Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Causal and the Withdrawn

This issue came up today in a discussion so here are some excerpts from my previous posts on the topic. They are from different posts in different discussion threads so lack coherent continuity as in an essay or academic presentation.

Kennilingam does posit the Causal, which is in a sense
withdrawn. But not in the OOO (and Bhaskar?) way. Per the Lingam the
Causal can be directly experienced, apparently in toto, via the nirodha
meditative state. My
take is that the withdrawn is real in an ontological sense but is not
the kind of firm foundation we see in a metaphysics of presence, since
it is not wholly present or given. Or wholly absent, for that matter,
since it is not Whole. In that sense it seems well akin to Kant's
unknowable, but is a thing in itself? It seems a thing in itself implies
something wholly present as given, whereas Bryant's objects are always
constructed and at least partially present, partially withdrawn.

I think this might be why Wilber reserves the causal apart from the
manifest, since the latter is always perspectival relations. In a sense
it's like Kant's unknowable transcendent categories or Bryant's
withdrawn, except that Wilber's causal is capable of being wholly
present via direct perception during certain meditations. This seems to be the metaphysics of presence, of
which one expression is the tenet of a direct experience with the
causal. I argued that this was in fact one pole of the epistemic fallacy
here. So in that way Wilber's epistem-ontology distinction is still caught in the epistemic realm.

Wilber lays out his ontology as subsistence via the causal in this post.
I commented thereafter that it superficially appears to be akin to
Bryant's virtual withdrawn in distinction with local manifestations. But
as you say it really doesn't get at the ontic because Wilber's causal
realm is completely withdrawn from ever entering the manifest realm,
always subsisting it and ne'er the twain shall meet. In many posts and
threads I've continually criticized this as duality, which is one of the
philosophical definitions of the metaphysics of presence. Whereas for
Bryant the ontic withdrawn, while never completely entering the
manifest, is still immanent and constructed nonetheless.

Given the thesis that this iterative differance is the endo-structural
core (khora) of the universal hyperobject at large, it too iterates with
each moment. It certainly appears to be an unchanging eternal form
given the size and scope. But per Bryant it requires corporeals to
manifest and thus change, and without which it too would dissipate and
die. Hence like the SES quote we have our causal realm as foundation for
the material, "not the goal of each and every thing but the Suchness of
each and every thing." But unlike Wilber's causal it is not timeless
and changeless.